VTA rides BART back to square one; committee will create new
plan for $6.4 billion BART extension
n By Matt King staff writer
San Jose – The plan to bring BART to the South Bay has been scrapped.
Thursday night, directors of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority voted to reject a spending plan to build BART and a host of other transit improvements that had been two years in development. Instead, the VTA has created a new committee to offer direction on a new transportation plan that will please everyone in the county.
“There are a lot of people out there who are dissatisfied and they’re not going to let up,” said Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage, also a VTA director. “If you get consensus, everybody has to get on board.”
BART is not likely to lose its place at the top of that priority list, but the move was an acknowledgment that the agency just doesn’t have the money to begin work on a project that would cost about $6.4 billion over the next 12 years. Nor can it afford the other improvements promised to voters by Measure A in 2000, such as a people mover at the Mineta San Jose International Airport, Caltrain improvements in South County, and a variety of new light rail lines.
And with the decision by county supervisors to pursue a half-cent sales tax for county services on the June ballot, the VTA is now at the mercy of federal, state and county officials for funding.
The agency, for now, has decided not go forward with its own quarter-cent sales tax measure and is hopeful of receiving some money, perhaps an equivalent amount from the county, should voters approve the June ballot measure.
The VTA is also not assured of the $1.5 billion in federal and state funding it needs to build BART. Without a new dedicated funding source, VTA staffers say receiving $750 million in federal funding for BART is “dubious.”
“There are revenue assumptions I’m not comfortable with,” VTA Chairwoman and San Jose City Council member Cindy Chavez said. “I’m not talking about what we may get from the county; I mean the whole enchilada.”
The special committee includes Gage, San Jose Councilman Forrest Williams, Santa Clara County Supervisor Liz Kniss, Dean Chu of Sunnyvale and Dolores Sandoval of Cupertino.
It is charged with developing a priority list of Measure A projects, and will also try to figure out, by August, how to include new projects that would have been included in a new VTA tax measure, and unite a divided VTA board.
For more than a year, the VTA had been headed to the 2006 ballot with a quarter-cent sales tax measure to raise enough money to extend BART from Fremont to San Jose. But in recent months, the agency’s spending plan for the tax was held up by representatives from cities that would not be served by BART. Those representatives felt the VTA was ignoring, among other things, the need to improve Caltrain service in South County and bus rapid transit projects in Silicon Valley.
“Not everyone’s going to get everything they want,” Chavez said, “but we represent the entire county and we need to have consensus. Consensus is my goal.”
The new projects include a pavement management program, expanded bus services and new services for seniors, all appealing to residents and politicians in North and South County. There is a chance the VTA will go to voters with a tax in November 2006 or 2008.
“What I envision is setting priorities and letting the VTA [staff] come back and tell us how to do it,” Gage said. “The reality is that some projects aren’t going to get done. Everybody is going to have to give something up.”
Gilroy Mayor Al Pinheiro, an alternate to the VTA board who will sit on the board in 2007, said he was pleased by the VTA’s new direction. The Gilroy City Council recently voted six to one to reject the spending plan. Morgan Hill’s City Council never took a vote.
“Now we have the time to look at all of the issues instead of just ramrodding this through,” Pinheiro said. “Hopefully, everyone in the county can get something good out of this.”
VTA officials are hopeful that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed $68 billion infrastructure bond, and a $13.6 billion bond idea floated by State Sen., Don Perata, D-Oakland, will translate into more state funding for the county, but is not able to approve projects based on that possibility. The lack of a VTA tax makes it impossible for the agency to take out new bonds on Measure A projects.
